Autumn Cattle Drive 2017

Each Autumn we drive all of our Highland cattle down from our hill land on the Pentland Hills in a big round-up.

This is done as part of our health-checks that we carry out on our cattle and to gauge the readiness of selected stock for assessment of condition.

As our cattle live an entirely natural life in an organic environment (we do not regularly handle them or hand-feed them), the cattle drive is always a good few hours of gently moving them along the terrain in to the cattle pens at one end of the farm where we can get a really good look at them in a close-up and safe environment.

In previous years, some of the more agile of the herd have chosen the cattle pens as their spring-board into paradise and would jump the boundary fences on to the golf course and go galavanting off down the fairways. Cows can be incredible jumpers and once they’ve learned how to do it, they regularly kick-up their heels and the others then pick this up and follow-suit. So we’ve had to put in giraffe-fencing as a preventative and so far we’ve had a 100% success rate!

Once we’ve carried out our checks the cattle are returned to the hills to carry on as they were.